


the devil and the deep blue sea

by elanoides



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-21
Updated: 2018-11-21
Packaged: 2019-08-27 08:04:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16698595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elanoides/pseuds/elanoides
Summary: “You seem like the sort who’d want to run away to sea.”“I do,” Fjord said, “yeah, I do. When I turn seventeen—” when the orphanage kicks me out— “I’m gonna hire on wherever I can.”“Let me give you some advice,” the stranger said. “Don’t.”(Fjord met a sailor on the docks and learned why the ocean is feared. Years later, he chases an unknown power deeper and deeper, past the point of no return.)





	the devil and the deep blue sea

Mid-afternoon, summer, and the sky was so clear it looked endless. The wind had changed, was blowing fair toward the harbor. The cobblestones were warm under Fjord’s bare feet as he crossed the street, ducking sailors and dock workers, and sat atop a stack of crates to watch the ships come in.

The _Murre_ approached, sails furling like birds’ wings. Fjord watched as the ship slowed at the dock. Sailors swarmed over the deck, tying off and hauling in, heaving cargo from the hold. The captain, a stocky, short-haired woman in a gray overcoat, strode down the gangplank.

Behind _Murre_ came _Star Follower_ , _Optimist_ , _Kaskara_. _Claw_ and _Whitestone’s Pride_ and _Stormchaser_. Fjord recognized most of them. _Whitestone’s Pride_ , a brigantine flying blue and gold, was new, and so was sleek, low-slung _Claw_ , but the others were frequent visitors to Port Damali.

There was a creak, and Fjord glanced up. The man who’d sat beside him was older, salt-haired, with sun-cracked skin. He looked back at Fjord. “Don’t shift yourself on my account.”

Another ship approached. _Tropicbird_ , with red banners flying from its masts. It was battered this time, sails more patched than the last time it’d seen this port.

“She’s been a long ways, that one,” the stranger said. “Clear out to the Bay of Gifts and back. You ever heard of that?” This seemed to be directed at Fjord.

“Yeah,” Fjord said, slowly. “It’s in Marquet.”

“Sure is.” The stranger had an odd accent— slow, drawling. “Takes months at sea to get there. They say it’s beautiful. I’ve never been myself, though.” He glanced at Fjord, who shifted on his crate. “You seem like the sort who’d want to run away to sea.”

“I do,” Fjord said, “yeah, I do. When I turn seventeen—” _when the orphanage kicks me out_ — “I’m gonna hire on wherever I can.”

“Let me give you some advice,” the stranger said. “Don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Sea’s hungry.” The stranger leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees. His gaze was fixed on the horizon. “It’ll swallow you whole,” he said, “and if it spits you back out you’ll be so different you won’t recognize your own face.”

“I wouldn’t mind that.”

The stranger sighed. “You’re not afraid at all, are you? Not scared of storms or serpents or whirlpools?”

“No. They’re just part of the sea.”

The stranger nodded. “Good. But there’s worse than that. How about this, kid— you ever hear of the Three Sisters?”

“What are they?” Fjord asked, although he definitely wasn’t a kid anymore.

“They’re waves from the northern ocean. Three big waves in a set. The first one rolls the ship on its side.”

“Ships can roll back up,” Fjord said.

The stranger nodded. “But then the next two waves come, right after the first, and the second wave slams the ship down, and the third one breaks it in half.” He made waves with his hands in the air, crashing over each other. “You know how many sailors die in the Sisters’ grasp? More than you can imagine.”

“But this isn’t the northern ocean,” Fjord said.

“You have me there.” The stranger tapped a finger to his chin. “Have you heard of kraken?”

Fjord blinked. “Yeah, I’ve heard of kraken.” Who _hadn’t_?

“Tentacles that can throw entire ships. Mouths like a thousand whirling blades. Eyes that can see in total darkness. Do you know where Port Alais is? Used to be called the Sunlit Cove?”

“No.”

“That’s because it was destroyed by a kraken. Sunk in a flash. A hundred thousand people, dead like _that_.” The stranger snapped his fingers. “Right on this very coast.”

“But there isn’t a kraken now, is there?”

The stranger shrugged. “We don’t know.”

Fjord eyed the stranger, a thought occurring to him. “Are you trying to convince me not to be a sailor?”

“Ah, well. It’s gotten me…” The stranger trailed off. “It’s gotten me places I would rather not have gone. But now I’m stuck. So the most I can do is try to pass on the wisdom I should’ve had when I see someone staring at the sea like they think it’ll take them where they want to go. Hate to see lives wasted on that empty promise.”

“Isn’t that sort of the point of sailing? Going where you want to go?”

The stranger chuckled. “True.”

He didn’t say anything after that, and Fjord sat in silence, watching the ships. _Murre_ pushed off again, skirting the docks and making for a berth on the far side of the harbor. The crew of _Kaskara_ was unloading the last of their cargo, a mountain of barrels with rusty hoops.

“You said you got to places you’d rather not have gone,” Fjord said, as _Kaskara_ made its way to another berth. “How’d that happen?”

“Ah,” the stranger said. “Good question.” He sighed, stretching his arms above his head. “How do I explain this? Well. Anyone ever tell you about how deep the sea is?”

“Just that we don’t know how deep it goes.”

“That isn’t quite true. We know how it gets deep, just not exactly where the bottom is. There’s an academy in— hell if I remember. Maybe Tal’Dorei. Might be Marquet, though. Somewhere out west. The mages there, they figured out how to make a map of the ocean by how much light there is as it gets deeper.” The stranger looked over at Fjord. “Seems I’m going to try to convince you not to go to sea. One last time, all right? Then I’ll leave you alone.”

“All right,” Fjord said. “So how deep is the sea?”

 

He wakes up slowly. Too cold to shiver, can’t feel his feet. There’s salt up his nose and it feels like it’s all the way in his head. His coat— where is his coat? He shook it off as he— as he— as he drowned. He couldn’t find the surface, no light, no air—

Another wave rushes in, soaks his shoulders before receding. The wind seems a little calmer now. He digs his unresponsive fingers into the black basalt sand, heaves himself onto his knees and looks around.

Beside him, within arm’s reach, is a sword. It’s driven into the sand, the stained scrimshaw hilt raised into the air. The crossguard is curved like a low wave, crest and trough. Raindrops splash off it; Fjord imagines whitecaps.

He reaches for it. The blade slides easily from the sand. It’s curved like a storm-petrel’s wing, wickedly hooked at the end. Heavy, but perfectly balanced. A falchion.

Fjord hangs the weapon from his belt and hauls himself farther down the beach, his feet dragging in the tide. Waves wash over his feet. The falchion moves with his every step.

 

“It’s fathoms deep,” the stranger said, “but let me begin at the beginning. They call the surface of the ocean the photic zone. Photic means light. It’s where there’s the most sunlight.”

“How deep is that?”

“A hundred fathoms. Let me think… the bay is two fathoms, maybe three, at the harbor wall. Ten fathoms out in the middle. You know what a fathom is?”

Of course he did. “The distance between your hands when you stretch as far as you can.”

“Also about the height of a human. Or a half-orc. So imagine a hundred people standing on each other’s heads. That’s the photic zone. In the photic zone you still have enough light to see by. There are birds, fish, you know. Up there is where we think we can survive. It’s the deepest anyone can dive without magic. According to the mages, anyway.”

“What’s below the photic zone?”

 

There’s no up or down and the water is endless and the only thing keeping him from panicking is the fact that he’s breathing. But he’s underwater, he can’t be breathing— is his heart beating? No, he can’t tell, so the only thing that means this isn’t an ordinary nightmare is that he isn’t drowning. Not yet, anyway. He clutches the falchion in his hand, feels its solid weight.

The shadows swirl, endless, shifting like only the sea can. Then the eye is _there_. It glows like the sun, if the sun were split by a gash of a pupil as dark as night. Fjord wants to cover his eyes, can’t move his hands.

_CONSUME_ , it says. _CONSUME_.

Fjord isn’t going to swallow any more water. Not so deep in the darkness. So the only thing to do— the only thing—

He raises the falchion. The eye watches. Fjord parts his lips, slides the hooked point of the blade over his tongue, deeper into his mouth. It goes in easily, a smooth, cold weight that cuts at the back of his throat. Then he realizes how _hungry_ he is, and he jams it down, ravenous, starving. Tastes blood and salt on his tongue. The eye says, _GOOD._

The ocean swirls, sweeps him away, back into darkness— he has to find the surface, _don’t let me drown_ —

He wakes. There is blood on his lips. The falchion flashes in his hand, its blade dripping seawater. He can almost hear the voice of the eye in the darkness: _REWARD._

 

“The mesopelagic zone is what they call it. Means “middle of the ocean”. That’s where it starts to get dark and stay dark. Even when it’s sunny up above, it’s twilight down there.”

“It never gets light?”

“Never. When you’re down there you can see the light, you can remember what it was like, but you can’t reach it. Or it doesn’t reach you. You’re too deep to really get back to it.” The stranger sat back against the crates. “But it doesn’t really matter, because there’s no chance you’re swimming back up from there anyway.”

“I swim pretty well,” Fjord said, because he did— had always swum well, never been swept away by a riptide or lost his feet off the breakwater.

“Not enough for that. The mesopelagic zone goes from a hundred fathoms— that’s the shallowest— all the way down to five hundred fathoms.”

“What’s after that?”

 

The orb glows faintly in the darkness of the cave. It’s sort of tempting. Small. Could hold it in his hand. Caleb’s casting a spell right now to see what it is, but surely Fjord could just—

and he isn’t _there_ anymore.

He’s standing in moonlit darkness, trees all around him, a corpse and a pool at his feet. The corpse, he doesn’t recognize, but he knows the dark splashes on his arms and chest for blood.

This is a vision, Fjord realizes. A dream. That’s all.

And the orb is in his hand. In his other, the falchion, the curve of it throwing off shadows.

He looks down, into the pool. At first it’s dark, and he sees the sides of it fall away, depth without end. Then the wind gusts, and the tree branches move, scattering moonlight over the pool.

The face in the pool is not his. It’s _Vandren’s_. Vandren, his captain, his mentor, his friend, and Fjord’s hand moves of its own accord, thrusting the orb into his stomach like there is a hollow beneath his ribs, but he can’t stop thinking: is this the past? Or, oh, gods, is it the present?

He wakes. No longer in the vision, and his hands are his own again, but the orb— the orb is gone.

Not _gone_ , per se. It’s… inside him. Fjord doesn’t know how a crystal orb the size of his fist could be _in_ him, but it’s happened now. It’s done.

He lies awake that night, wondering if he can feel the orb inside him.

 

“The bathyal zone is next. That’s where there’s no light at all. Once you’re down that deep, you’re never going to see the sun again.”

“How deep is that?”

“Five hundred fathoms. And it goes all the way down to two thousand.”

“Two thousand fathoms,” Fjord said. “I can’t even imagine that.”

The stranger chuckled. “You wouldn’t want to. It’s night all day down there. And the pressure would crush you like an ant under your boot.”

“Are there fish there? Or sharks or squid or something?”

“Sure. There’s living things anywhere. Weird things, but living.”

“So it can’t be that bad, can it?”

 

Avantika dives. Fjord goes after her. She’s already thirty feet below him, a flash of red, going down and down and down. The pool is deeper than he thought. He assumed they’d reach bottom in a matter of seconds, but Avantika just keeps going.

It’s a relief to feel salt. The water is cool, but not uncomfortable. Just enough to make him wary. Reminds him of something Vandren said once. The rapture… yeah, that was it, the rapture of the deep. People fall in love with the ocean and they dive so deep they can’t come back up.

But Fjord has his armor, he has the breath in his lungs, he has his patron’s blessing. The pool widens, the walls vanishing into gloom, and then the bottom looms up ahead of them. Fjord runs his hands over the stones. Algae pools thickly around his fingers— and there, carved into the rock, a divot.

Fjord pauses. Avantika looks up at him. Then she kicks, claws toward him through the algae, and even as he’s raising the falchion, Avantika slams her palm into the divot.

Water swallows sound, but Fjord feels the thrum of power as Avantika’s head snaps back in a scream. Runes burst beneath the algae, the silver of stars and the gold of the eye, running up the walls of the pool. In the half-light, Avantika’s body drifts up, her hand still anchored to the orb. When it comes free, she clutches it to her chest, trailing dark clouds of blood.

Avantika rights herself in the water. The shout that escaped her is still bubbling faintly above them, vanishing toward the tiny pinprick of light that marks the mouth of the pool, fathoms away. Twenty, maybe thirty.

Fjord reacts without thinking— rolls and kicks off the bottom, catching Avantika’s ankle in his hand. She can’t get away, not with whatever she just stole from right underneath him.

Avantika kicks free effortlessly, looks back at him. _What?_

Fjord wonders that himself. He gestures, _look_ , but Avantika’s already turned back, following the runes that twist toward the mouth of the pool. To the surface.

Fjord starts swimming upward.

              

“Oh, it can be. Below that is the abyssal zone, from two thousand fathoms all the way down to three thousand. For the most part that’s the bottom of the sea. It’s colder than winter. No sound either. You know, they sent a mage down there with spells to breathe and see and stay warm and not be crushed by the weight of the water. What do you think happened to her?”

Fjord tried to think of what could kill someone at sea that magic wouldn’t protect them from. “Did she… get eaten by something?”

“Fair guess, but no. She went insane.”

Fjord stared at the stranger. Curiosity crept up his spine, wrapped hands around his ankles. “What’s deeper than that?”

 

It’s night by the time Fjord finally gets a moment to himself. He excuses himself from the tent, trying not to wake the others, although Caduceus has ears like a bat. Fuckin’ mind reader.

He makes his way down to the beach. Under the moonlight, the black sand and the dark, rolling waves look like an endless void. Fjord crosses the beach slowly, feeling the distance between himself and the ocean collapse to nothing. He steps into the surf, and the waves rush back and forth around his bare feet.

There’s something here. He can feel it now— something vast, awe-inspiring. Powerful.

He didn’t let anyone enter the second temple with him. Caduceus and Jester agreed to dive to ten fathoms and wait for him in case he needed help, but Fjord went deeper, deeper, deeper, twenty fathoms, thirty. He felt the pressure build, gripping around his chest. It was noon on the surface, but the crumbling walls of the temple were in shadow.

It must have been hundreds of feet tall when it still stood. It would have risen from the ocean, vast, monolithic. Fjord stands in the surf and lets himself, carefully, remember the heart of the temple— the swirling patterns carved into the floor, coiled around a divot the size of his palm.

He’d been trying not to think about the orb inside his chest. He summoned the falchion and thrust it into the divot, but the eye on the hilt remained. Something tore in his stomach, and Fjord convulsed, feeling the orb rise into his throat. It lurched upward, surging past his lips and tumbling down into the divot.

And then, in the darkness, light…

Fjord shakes his head. It’s over. He’s on the surface. He’s breathing. (He can’t remember whether he held his breath on the ascent from the temple. Maybe the water flowed into his lungs like air.)

No time for that. There’s something else he needs to do.

Fjord kneels and dips his hand into the low waves. He turns his hand over, feeling the current run through his fingers, caress his palm. Like a friend. Like a lover.

He stands. The water rises. It flows in ribbons past his chest, above his head. Barely a thought, and it bows around him, lifting away from his feet.

Fjord starts walking.

The waves bend, arch, and the pathway opens before him. He’s a fathom down. Two. Three. He can feel every wave above him, every shift in the current, every darting minnow and prowling shark.

Fjord takes another step, and suddenly there is nothing before him but dark water. The sand drops away into depth. He reaches out, stretches his hand into the water before him. It feels like reaching into air. He could go deeper. He could find the next temple— could find it tonight, with this power— and then he would be brave, he wouldn’t ever have to—

“Fjord? Hey— _Fjord!_ ”

Beau. She’d been on watch. She’s standing up on the beach, staring at him, and seeing her, Fjord realizes just how deep he’s gone already. He turns and jogs back up, feeling the sea wash down behind him. The waves lick gently at his heels.

 

“It goes much, much deeper than that. The hadal zone is what they call the ocean trenches. Those trenches are six thousand fathoms deep, and if anything lives down there, it never even dreamed of light.”

“Has anyone gone there?” Fjord asked.

“Not as I know. Can’t imagine anyone would want to, either. You’d be so far from the sun you couldn’t even remember it.” The stranger sat, elbows on his knees, looking toward the horizon. Fjord remained silent until the stranger finally said, “Well, go ahead, ask me.”

“Is there anything deeper?”

 

Fjord dreams.

His dreams are dark for a long, long time. Hours pass in years, and years in seconds, until light begins to fill the dark and endless water. The eye rises before him.

“Thank you,” Fjord says. “What do I do next?”

_SEEK._

There is a current, and it pulls Fjord deeper, and the light grows brighter and brighter until his eyes ache.

And then—

In the center of the sea, many leagues from shore or harbor, an island juts out of the roiling waves. It is craggy, cliff-lined, strung with the darting shapes of storm-petrels. The center of the island has been carved out by the unceasing hands of the sea, and though it is open to the sky, the walls are so high that its heart is always in shadow. The sea boils up from the bottom, a rushing pool, and at the center, a platform carved with swirling, coiling shapes.

Within the island, a place that has never seen the sun, a place that knows only the endless motion of waves. Within the island—

_REWARD_ , says the ancient thing, its voice borne on sea currents. _REWARD_ , and louder, booming, _REWARD_.

Fjord is drowning before he can say anything before he can reach out say stop don’t take me no not yet let me _go_ —

He wakes, shuddering, soaked, with the shape of the island burning behind his eyes.

 

“The demersal zone. The very bottom of the sea,” said the stranger. “With six thousand fathoms between you and the last light you ever saw.”

“Does anything live down there?”

“The mages say there might be slugs and crabs, that sort of thing. Fish with no eyes.”

“Do you think they’re right?”

At that, the stranger sighed. “Yes,” he said. “But it’s a terrible kind of life to live.”

Fjord watched him a moment, but the stranger said nothing more.

“I know you said it’s the bottom,” Fjord said. “But, uh…”

“Go on,” the stranger said. He sounded tired.

“Does the ocean get deeper than that? Is there anything else, I mean? Below the bottom of the sea?”

 

The island isn’t on any of the maps, but Fjord knows where it is, as surely as the tide rises. It pulls him like a lodestone, like a riptide. He knows where to anchor the _Mistake_ , just shy of the shallow, lurking reefs. He knows the path atop the shoals that arc out from the island. He knows where to walk so that the waves crash around his feet, and when the path ends, he knows to dive headfirst into the churning waters. He knows where to find the cleft in the rock that slopes upward from the surf, and he knows every handhold and foothold that leads him to the peak of the island: a rim around the yawning void that fills the third temple of Uk’otoa.

Fjord finds a series of steps carved into the spray-slick rock. The stairway circles all the way around the temple, spiraling downward to the swirling pool and the stone platform at its center. Fjord shields his eyes against the low sunlight and looks out over the shoals. The _Mistake_ is to the north, anchored to a reef. At the southwest and east-southeast, two dinghies float— Caleb and Yasha in one, Beau and Jester in the other.

And drawing ever nearer, as it has been for hours now, the _Squall Eater_.

Fjord starts down into the abyss.

There’s something strange about the acoustics of the temple. The sound of the wind doesn’t vanish as Fjord descends, but it changes. A low, bone-rattling hum, rising and falling. It’s the sound of a storm coming, Fjord thinks.

He reaches the bottom of the stairs just as Avantika surfaces from the pool, red hair streaming behind her. Fjord feels a twist in his stomach as he sees her. Used to be fear, but as she looks at him with a smirk unfurling on her face, the fear hardens to bitter rage. Avantika only laughs. “Hello again.”

In a flash, she flips over and dives, vanishing. Fjord rocks low on the balls of his feet, reaching out to the churn of the tide, the rise and fall of the waves against the walls of the temple. And there, moving with the swift, violent strokes of a thresher shark, Avantika.

Fjord seizes hold of the water just as she surfaces in front of him, a wave cresting before her. The wave surges, knocking his feet out from under him, and though he struggles he’s swept clean off the steps and into the pool.

Fjord dives deeper. Avantika doesn’t know he got the other orb, she can’t know, so maybe if he pretends he’s already drowned—

There’s a rushing in his ears, and a sudden current tugs him back. She wasn’t fooled. Or just cautious, since they tricked her in Darktow. But that’s all right; Fjord has learned.

He seizes the current and pulls it, and it sweeps him past the platform and up, lifting him just enough to get a grip on the edge of the platform. He gets atop it and rolls to his feet. “Avantika!”

She’s in the water, but even as he shouts she swims lazily toward him. “So you too have learned the power of our patron. Curious.”

“I went to the second temple.”

“And I to Vandren’s wreck. A shame, really, that it sank. That was a worthy ship.” Avantika lifts herself out of the water to stand on the edge of the platform, across from Fjord.

“You got the orb?”

Avantika pats the pouch strapped to her hip. “Indeed. Dashilla was loath to give it up, but she saw my side eventually.” She draws her rapier almost casually. A wave rises at her back, white-crested, thrumming with power. “But enough small talk, eh? We both know how this must end.”

“Let’s find out,” Fjord says, and the falchion flashes into his hand.

He gets halfway across the platform before Avantika meets him there, rapier raised. Their blades slam together, and Avantika’s wave crashes over them.

He didn’t mean to charge her, really, but she wants a fight and all he can think of is how she controlled him, that night in her cabin, and at the Bloated Cup. Treating him like he was _hers_ , a token, a pawn— he’s furious, and they are locked together in the grip of a wave that surges with both of their powers, and Fjord doesn’t know where the surface is, but air hasn’t mattered to him for weeks.

The falchion falls from his hand, Avantika loses her rapier to the current, and they are struggling hand to hand. Fjord tries to punch her, but the water thrusts him back and Avantika grabs his throat. The wave slams Fjord flat on his back. Fjord tries to flail out of Avantika’s grasp, but her grip is firm, and there’s a dagger in her hand.

Fjord closes his eyes. All around them, the sea rages, spun into a froth by their struggle. He can feel the power there, the surging force of it. It’s just there, practically within arm’s reach.

The water surrounding him slows in its frenzy, and then it _shifts_.

Fjord and Avantika tumble through it like so much flotsam, and in a moment of clarity Fjord sees her hands lift from his shoulders. The water slams them down onto the stone, and when Fjord’s vision clears he finds Avantika pinned facedown beneath him. He sets the current swirling around them, and he frees one of his hands to scrabble for the pouch on her hip. It comes loose in his hand, and the orb falls into his palm. It looks just like all the others: golden, split down the middle, glowing with internal light.

Fjord turns, kneeling now in the center of the platform, and runs his hands over the swirling patterns carved into it. They circle and circle, coiling in toward— there. A divot, the size and shape of the orb. Beckoning.

He wasn’t going to do it. He was just going to meet Avantika, get the orb, destroy it. But now something inside him snaps, and he slams the orb down.

Everything, _everything_ , is light.

It’s brilliant, all-encompassing, so blinding it seems like darkness. With the light comes a surge of power so strong it would knock Fjord backward if his hand weren’t gripped clawlike around the orb, and as his mouth opens in a scream he feels the sea surge upward. Around the platform, around the orb, around the Chosen of Uk’otoa, the water is still; outside, in the blast, the very sky is flooded.

_POWER_ , says a voice as deep as the sea, _RISING, POWER_.

After moments, or eons, the surge subsides. Fjord rises to his feet. The falchion rests in his hand; in the other, the cloven shape of the crystal remains like a brand. Everything in his head is very quiet.

A body lies still on the platform. It takes him a moment to remember who it is. Fjord crosses to Avantika and rolls her over. Her hair drifts in the wash of water that accompanies his footsteps. Her eyes stare blankly upward. Fjord has seen enough drowning victims to know the signs.

Fjord lifts his hands, and a wave rises beneath him, raising him toward the sky— toward the world where Uk’otoa, the Abyssal Serpent, the Deadly Eye, the Scourge of the Depths, has been reborn.

 

“The bottom of the sea,” the stranger said, “is called the benthic zone. The deepest of the deep. There’s no more sea, even, below the benthic zone. It’s the darkest part of the darkness down there, and freezing cold. All the water above you weighs so much you could never even start swimming back up to the light. When you get that deep you’ll never come back up, and your bones will never move from their resting place.”

“And there’s nothing deeper than that?”

“No,” the stranger said. “Nothing.”

 

The serpent is massive.

It coils through the water, just under the surface, winding around and around the island temple. Eyes, golden and glowing, lift from the water as the serpent glides with the current. It grows longer and longer as Fjord watches from the upper rim of the temple, scales unspooling behind it, until the last of it has taken shape in the depths.

Uk’otoa rises, its gargantuan three-eyed head drawing level with Fjord. The last of the sunlight glitters on its scales, blue and green and black, as dark as the bottom of the sea.

_COME_ , it says. _COME, CHOSEN_. Its voice is like a monsoon: unstoppable, inevitable. Drawing the very ocean in its wake.

“I would be honored,” Fjord says.

 

The stranger turned to Fjord, but did not seem to see him. Fjord sat, transfixed. “The sea takes,” the stranger said. “It’ll call you and you’ll go, but once you’re in its clutches you will _never_ come back.”

He shook his head, his eyes clearing somewhat. “Well. Are you convinced?”

“Oh,” Fjord said. He’d almost forgotten why they were talking about the sea. It was meant to scare him, wasn’t it? “Uh. Not really.”

The stranger chuckled, dry. “No one ever wants my particular advice. Fine.” He stood, dusting himself off. “Listen, kid. You ever want a ship to sail off on— I’m in Port Damali every so often. Ask for Vandren. They’ll send you my way.”

The stranger turned away and vanished into the crowd. A big frigate had just docked, and its passengers were streaming down onto the docks; in an instant, the stranger was gone.

Fjord stared after him a moment, then turned his gaze back to the horizon.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t know what’s gonna happen to our favorite Texblade, but I don’t think it’ll be, y’know, good. 
> 
> All ocean information contained in this fic is as accurate as possible given the weird physics and literal magic involved in D&D. The deepest point I could find a rule reference for was 3000 feet/500 fathoms— a fathom is six feet/two meters. So I’m assuming pressure damage and freezing to death become more of an issue after a certain depth, and also that oceans on Exandria are as deep as ours. 
> 
> On the other hand, all the other information about the ocean is real! Fun fact: the mesopelagic zone is also called the twilight zone. There’s a joke somewhere in there. In terms of our technology, the deepest someone has dived without air is 117 fathoms, the deepest with air is 182 fathoms, and we’ve sent people to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in submarines. 
> 
> The structure of this fic is inspired by “Into the Drowning Deep” by Mira Grant (pen name of Seanan McGuire). It’s a hard sci-fi novel about mermaids in the Mariana Trench and I highly recommend it.
> 
> I’m @swallowtailed on Tumblr— come say hi! And leave a comment or a kudos if the mood strikes you.


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